Healthy, Safe, Strong, Efficient – Why Exercise Works

The human body is an amazingly well architected organism where every single element enhances others. Getting fitter also makes you healthier. Learning how to hold good posture also makes you more powerful. The list goes on.

We will make you fitter and stronger while enhancing what you’re getting from nutrition. We’ll strengthen your immune system protecting you from illness and increase the strength and health of your heart and circulatory system. We will increase your capacity for movement so you feel lighter and have more energy.

Living Pain Free – Exercising Your Body

Having a pain free and fully functioning body is a basic state too few people live with. We get into the habit of thinking it’s okay if our back or neck hurts if we sit in a certain position or that our knees hurt when we run. Most of the time we don’t pay it any attention.

The irony is that many of our common ailments are not hard to alleviate. We just need to know how. Once you learn how to sit and stand properly, coordinate your spine and control your shoulders, pelvis and knees you see that simple changes make a huge difference.

What To Do – Our Fitness Process

We’ll guide you through this process of becoming fitter and healthier. We’ll teach you how to control your muscles and joints, improve your balance and stability and increase your strength and flexibility. You’ll learn a template for great human movement that will keep your joints healthy long into old age. Your nagging pains will be alleviated and your strength increased while you protect yourself from the threat of injury. Finally, we’ll drastically increase your fitness so you can do more than you ever could before.

Take a look through some of the experiences of our other clients who came to us looking to improve their health and fitness:

As a semi-professional rugby player, Giles' goals were twofold: improve his strength and conditioning to make him a better athlete and do everything he could to reduce his susceptibility to injury.

When Giles first came to us his strength was at a very high level. His mobility and flexibility and the postural balance of his body, however, was not. This tightness had two consequences: it increased the chances Giles would become injured by being bent out of the narrow range of movement he was comfortable in and meant he wasn't fulfilling his potential for strength and power.

The human body has an optimum level of flexibility and mobility for safety and for strength and power. Tightness restricts the body's ability to generate force. Through our training we identified Giles' mobility restrictions and rectified them. We dramatically improved Giles' capacity and range of movement. We taught him how best to coordinate his body into its safest and strongest positions.

We significantly increased Giles' strength and power without needing to make his muscles stronger. We changed how his body moved so that he could unlock and use the potential his already strong muscles contained. We taught Giles great posture and body positioning, we improved his muscular coordination and he learned how to create his most stable and so strongest and safest positions. Now Giles can continue to get stronger and be confident that he's using his body to its full potential.

This is what Giles says:

"I went to Nathan originally because I thought my tightness was causing me to pick up injuries. I'd spent time stretching but I never saw much progress and was recommended Nathan as someone who could make a real difference.

Nathan told me I was right about lack of mobility causing injuries but he also showed me how it was making me weaker. I was initially sceptical when he told me I could life heavier weights without increasing my muscles strength but over the weeks I saw it happen myself. We spent a lot of time mobilising and increasing my range of movements and it really changed the way I was able to weight train.

With more joint mobility I am able get my body into stronger positions which allows me to pull more weight in the gym and so get stronger faster. And I'm also now much less afraid something will snap when I get caught in awkward positions in games. Nathan really delivered everything he said he would, I'd recommend him to anyone."

Name : Damien

Age : 37

Occupation : Project Manager

Goals : Alleviate knee and lower back pain, increase strength

Damien suffered regularly from knee and lower back pain which negatively impacted his life in numerous ways. It also stopped Damien from throwing himself into the strength training that he enjoyed.

As we trained with Damien a diagnostic picture began to emerge. Years of routinely asymmetrical body positioning (working at a computer off to his left side, always sleeping on the same side, etc.) had caused Damien's body itself to become asymmetrical. With little awareness of what was going on these patterns had exaggerated to the point where the size of the unbalance was causing Damien significant pain and discomfort.

Our plan centred around making Damien aware of how he was using his body and providing an ideal template to measure that against. We taught Damien what an ideal spine looks like so he knew when he was hunched over and how to fix it. We showed Damien how the way he was using his knees was causing him pain so that he could recognise when he was slipping back into these bad movement patterns.

This increased awareness was combined with a strength training programme to increase Damien's capacity to hold good body positions with little effort. Our technique work constantly reinforced good and safe body positioning so Damien had a lot of practise creating great joint alignment which he could apply outside of the gym.

Damien is now much more aware of what his body is doing. He has better coordination and control over the important muscles that determine posture and alignment and is regaining the symmetry that was eroded over 20 years. He's also a whole lot stronger and knows exactly why aches and pains flair up and what to do about it.

This is what Damien says about training with us:

"I've had back and knee problems and pains for going on 10 years now and seen a load of health professionals in that time to try and sort things out. I originally went to Nathan looking to increase my strength, it didn't occur to me that a personal trainer could help with my pains where physical therapists and osteopaths had struggled. I don't think that any more.

Nathan watched the way I went through various exercises and movements and spent a lot of time teaching me about what my body was doing. He taught me all about posture and now I know exactly what I should be doing with my body. I know what it feels like when I'm in a bad position and through the training with him I've developed the coordination and knowledge of how to change that into positions that don't cause me pain.

As we've continued to train (over six month now!) Nathan's continued to learn more and more about my body and the exercise we're doing together is constantly changing to reflect his deeper understanding. My body is still a work in progress but Nathan has given me the confidence that we really are making things better. When I do get pain I know where it's come from and I know what to do about it. I know what I should be doing when I'm cycling, when I'm sitting at work, when I'm strength training as well as anything else I may be doing.

This change from just suffering from pain I didn't understand to knowing where it comes from and being confident I can do something about it is massive for me. Taking on Nathan as my personal trainer was a great decision."

Abi came to us looking to increase her physical capability and confidence for her job and the rugby she plays. This meant improving her strength, fitness and coordination and combining them to become a great all-round athlete.

With an emphasis on the large and powerful muscle groups we designed Abi a whole-body strength training plan and a fitness programme. We improved the stability of her spine (which was unstable due to a previous crushed vertebrae), giving her the confidence to be physical when she needed to. We greatly improved her muscular coordination, allowing Abi to be much more powerful in the field and on the pitch. We dramatically increased her fitness and significantly increased her whole body strength (Abi had almost doubled her chest pressing strength after less than 3 months of training).

Abi is now better at her job, she's a better rugby player, she's more flexible and has better mobility. She's more coordinated and agile, she's much fitter and stronger, she's healthier, and much of her previous lower back and shoulder/neck pain has been alleviated.

As Abi says:

"Having spent my 20s confident that I’d be effortlessly fit and robust for ever, it was somewhat alarming to hit 34 and realise that I was, frankly, a bit feeble. In both policing and rugby you can get by for a while on others’ assumptions that you must be quite hard. At some point, though, someone’s going to call your bluff. So, despite a slight inclination to sneer at the idea of personal training, I called Nathan.

His immediate enthusiasm and obvious professionalism quickly overcame my scepticism. In our first couple of sessions Nathan identified a lack of stability as being a key limiting factor in my performance and put together an initial programme that really focussed on this. From the start I saw my posture and mobility improving and am now lifting weights and seeing a marked increase in my strength. I’m fitter too, and have lost many of the back and hip niggles that I’d assumed were companions for life.

My goals were to become fitter, stronger and better able to physically assert myself when the need arose. Through Nathan’s expert and personable coaching I’m now more confident in my physicality both on the beat and on the field of play. Even better, I’m enjoying the process."